Week of October 14, 2013

Linguistics Circle Workshop

Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini (University of Arizona)
Steps to the Physics of Language
Thursday, October 17 | 5:30-7pm | Boylston 303
(Please note the different date and location)

The study of complex systems seems to affirm the Thompson-Turing claim that “some physical processes are of very general occurrence.” Notably, those involving Fibonacci-based “golden” forms, ubiquitous in nature, and a number of mathematical models standard in modern physics (matrix representation of operators, with associated eigenvalues and eigenvectors expressing directional stability). This lends immediate interest to the observation that the repeated structural motif in the human syntactic system, the X-bar schema, is likewise a “golden” form (Piattelli-Palmarini and Uriagereka 2008, Medeiros 2008, Piattelli-Palmarini and Medeiros in preparation) and leads us to inquire whether whatever is behind the natural ubiquity of such phenomena, in other domains, might possibly be at work in language as well. If so, this peculiar aspect of human phrase structure (the X-bar configuration) would fall under Chomsky’s (2005) “third factor”, a factor about language which is neither encoded in the particulars of our genome, nor learned from the environment, but determined by domain-general principles beyond the organism."

Polinsky Lab Meeting:

Zuzanna Fuchs (Harvard University, Department of Linguistics)
On Gender and an Unusual Path of Analogical Extension: From Animacy to Borrowings in Polish
Wednesday, October 16 | 5:15-7pm | Boylston 303

Since the fall of the Soviet Union just over two decades ago, contact between Poland and the United States has increased dramatically. But with the upsurge of American cultural and technological goods entering the Polish culture, has daily language been affected as well? It is possible that the influx of English lexical items, coupled with the prestige associated with the domains they enter through has left a lasting mark on how these words are treated in the Polish grammar. In exploring this possibility in the present study, I have observed a notable diachronic change in the inflectional morphology applied to English loanwords.

GSAS Indo-European and Historical Linguistics Workshop:

Laura Grestenberger (Harvard University, Department of Linguistics)
Reconstructing Proto-Indo-European deponents
Friday, October 18 | 4:30pm | Boylston 103

This paper contributes to the ongoing debate about the function of the PIE middle voice by looking at a class of verbs that have so far received little attention: PIE transitive deponents. Deponents are usually defi ned as verbs that only take non-active (passive or middle) morphology, but syntactically behave like active verbs. From a theoretical perspective, such verbs are interesting because they instantiate a mismatch between morphological form and(expected) syntactic function. However, in practice this label is often used in a broad sense, including all types of non-oppositional middles and thereby obscuring the problem of the non-canonical use of middle morphology. Based on recent comparative work on non-active voice, I argue that canonical middles (both oppositional and media tantum) in PIE had very di fferent paradigms from those that can be reconstructed for true mismatch verbs, i.e., transitive deponents. The latter group displayed a split along tense-aspect categories in that deponent behavior was restricted to imperfective categories that is, semi-deponency was actually the default situation for transitive deponents. This finding allows us to make predictions about the expected distribution of middle morphology and can guide our reconstruction of canonical middle vs. deponent paradigms.

MIT Colloquium 

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Jen Smith (UNC Chapel Hill)
Lexical-category effects in phonology: Whence and why?
Friday, October 18 | 3:30-5pm | 32-141